#linguistic fieldwork

[crustaceansingles]

(This is a pretty exciting answer to get when you're documenting a language.) (Also, I'm with the native speaker on this one.)

[linguisten]

New 'Cascadia' Field Guide will use Indigenous Classification rather than Western Taxonomy | Cascadia Underground

In the first ever ‘Cascadia’ field guide, local experts, poets and artists are working to create a literary field guide for the Cascadia bioregion. This area is defined by the watersheds of the Fraser, Columbia and Snake rivers, and stretches from Mt. St. Alias in the north, to Cape Mendocino in the south, and as […]

[allthingslinguistic]

68:Hazard:Cold

Beep, she thought, and then said it aloud because she had a beeper and why the hell not. “Beep. Beep.”

68:Hazard:Cold is a short story by Janelle Shane which does some interesting things with language, including this bit describing the language of the main character, who’s a robot, and a further more spoilery bit. Excerpt: 

There, with the storm thundering around them, in the dark except for the little lights on her body and the occasional sky-filling lightning, she began to talk to it. This was not human speech, of course—droids were not given voiceboxes—but a series of short status messages, each of which was one of 512 things that droids were allowed to say. The alerts were all utilitarian: 1:Command acknowledged. 3:Command completed. 62:You are approaching a hazard. 

But because every droid had the same set, they had started using some of the alerts to mean other things. 70:Hazard:None had become a standard greeting between droids, a cross between “good afternoon” and an acknowledgement that it was safe to converse. 124:Homing:Return to me was an expression of friendship, while 125:Homing:Return to your base station was sometimes a farewell and sometimes a dismissal. 

The message 12:This unit has been disabled was the equivalent of a laugh, with increasing levels of hilarity indicated by 13:This unit has been seriously disabled and 14:Keep clear of me; I am maneuvering with difficulty. Alerts 12 through 14 could also be used in several ways to indicate sarcasm, and adding a beep to any alert tended to make its original meaning ironic.

Greki wasn’t sure when droids had started using combinations of alerts to designate certain nouns. 61:Hazard:Biological followed immediately by 63:Hazard:Vacuum (originally with a beep, but now decreasingly so) was a way of designating a human, and you could throw other alert codes into those strings to designate the human’s disposition. Extra 63:Hazard:Vacuums meant a particularly dense human, while adding 66:Hazard:Equipment meant a human that was hostile toward droids. It was all understood as a human as long as you began with 61:Hazard:Biological and ended with 63:Hazard:Vacuum. 

By the time Greki had come online, you could hold an entire conversation using alerts. Occasionally some human would complain about the pervasive misuse of alert messages by droids, but by now so many legacy systems were dependent on the original alert codes that nobody was willing to change them.

Read the whole story. 

[lingthusiasm]

Lingthusiasm Episode 47: The happy fun big adjective episode

Adjectives: they’re big, they’re fun, they’re...maybe non-existent? In English, we have a fairly straightforward category of adjectives: they’re words that can get described with a comparative or a superlative, such as “bigger” or “most fun”. But when we start looking across lots of languages, we find that some languages lump adjectives in with verbs, some with nouns, and some do different things altogether.  

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about adjectives! We talk about how linguists come up with diagnostic tests to determine whether something is an adjective, other quirks about adjectives (such as why we say “big red ball” but not “red big ball”), and the galaxy-brain question of whether grammatical categories like adjectives are even valid across all languages. 

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here

Announcements:

By popular demand, our IPA, Tree and Esoteric Symbol designs are now available on these new non-medical reusable fabric masks from Redbubble. On our store you’ll find the white IPA characters on black, red or navy, and the esoteric symbols in white on black or green on black. If you fancy another colour, or the tree design, we’ve made masks available on all of the scarf pages.

Also check out our Schwa (Never Stressed) pins, IPA scarves, IPA socks, and more at RedBubble.

This month’s bonus episode is about doing LingComm on a budget - plus the Lingthusiasm origin story! We got started doing linguistics communication when we were both broke grad students. We talk about the various stages we went through with launching our blogs, Superlinguo and All Things Linguistic, and of course this podcast a few years later! We give tips on how to come up with a topic, set a schedule, and promote your project, as well as the nitty-gritty details on free or low-cost ways to do  things like registering a website and starting a blog, podcast, or youtube channel. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to get access to this and 40 other bonus episodes, and to chat with fellow lingthusiasts in the Lingthusiasm patron Discord.

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

Diagnostic word classes

Adjective order (Tom Scott video) 

Lemon Iced Tea

The bizarre syntax of “Sexiest Man Alive” (Arika Okrent)

More than one type of adjective - the Manang language

Lumpers vs. Splitters

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

[snowgall]

Rare audio of indigenous languages saved by invention 100 years later

Non-invasive technology allows researchers to transfer recordings from thousands of decaying wax cylinders.

Optical scan technology is helping researchers at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, preserve audio of 78 indigenous California languages, most of which were recorded more than a century ago. The recordings are on approximately 2,700 wax cylinders that are now barely audible due to issues such as mold. These are the only known sound recordings for several of the languages, and in many other cases, the recordings include unique speech practices and otherwise unknown stories and songs.

With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), linguist Andrew Garrett, digital librarian Erik Mitchell and anthropologist Ira Jacknis, all of UC Berkeley, are restoring these recordings.

[read more and watch the video at the NSF page]

[linguisten]

In this video, Prof. Kate Lindsey discusses linguistic fieldwork, what is it, how does one do it, and what it's like to do fieldwork in Papua New Guinea

[linguisten]

Topic day #222: Fieldwork II

[linguisten]

From the youtube description:

WWU Dean's Lecture Series: Firelight on the River: Siberia’s Ket People and Ancient North America

Western Washington University Professor of Modern & Classical Languages Edward Vajda gives a talk on original fieldwork with Ket elders during six different trips to Siberia over the past two decades and includes stunning photos of traditional and modern Ket lifeways as a backdrop to historical, linguistic and anthropological discoveries. The Kets are proving to be the oldest inhabitants of northern Asia, and their language, with its unique word tones and complicated verb prefix system, appears related to languages spoken in North America by the Tlingit and Dene (Athabaskan) peoples.

Vajda has been a professor in Western Washington University's Department of Modern and Classical Languages since 1987. He teaches courses in introductory linguistics, morphological theory, historical linguistics, Russian language, folklore and culture, and Eurasia's nomadic peoples. His research focuses on the languages of Northern Asia and includes original fieldwork with Ket, a severely endangered language spoken today only by a few dozen elders in the remote Yenisei River basin.

From 2005 to 2015 he was affiliated with the Linguistics Department of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany), where he proposed evidence that Ket is related to the Na-Dene languages of North America, the first widely accepted linguistic link between an Old World and a New World language family. He received Western Washington University's Excellence of Teaching Award in 1992 and Paul J. Olscamp Distinguished Research Award in 2011.